Business

New generation is eyeing Time & Life Building

With rumors swirling that Time Inc. will move from the Time & Life Building in Rockefeller Center to cheaper digs when it is spun off as a stand-alone company later this year, other media companies appear eager to take up residence in the 48-story skyscraper on “Publishers Row.”

Complex Media plans to move most of its 215 employees there at the end of this month, according to CEO Rick Antoniello. Complex is taking the entire 35th floor, some 40,000 square feet, which was formerly occupied by bankrupt Lehman Brothers.

Antoniello said his company is growing at an annual clip of 40 percent and should surpass $100 million in revenue this year.

“It’s time to step up into a triple-A building,” he said. “We’re not a run- and-gun startup anymore.”

He added about 50 employees in the past year, in contrast to Time Inc., which cut 500 jobs at the start of the year.

Antoniello will be landing one floor above Time Inc. Editor-in-Chief Martha Nelson and lame duck CEO Laura Lang, whose replacement has yet to be named.

Time Inc.’s lease runs through 2017, but belt-tightening has left it with a lot of unused space.

It leases about 1.7 million square feet of the 2 million-square-foot building from the Rockefeller Group.

The publisher of Time, Fortune and People magazines has been in the building since the skyscraper opened its doors in 1959.

Regardless of where Time Inc. ends up after the spinoff from parent Time Warner, Complex will have plenty of media company.

Earlier this year, Sandow Media, which publishes Worth and a slew of regional titles, moved into space that was once occupied by retrenching Fortune magazine.

More recently, some of the old Lehman offices at the Time & Life Building were filled by Elle and sister titles from Hachette, before its acquisition by Hearst.

YouTube 2

Google is changing the way branded content is displayed on YouTube so that it can be watched seamlessly across devices.

The redesign has been in the works for months, but many marketers have not yet made design changes to be compatible with the new look, which debuts today.

More than 100 million YouTube channels have switched, but a majority have yet to make the change to be compatible, according to a spokesman.

The good news is that under the new design, content will now be made compatible with all digital platforms, including mobile phones, tablets and, of course, computer screens, with the ability to scale and resize.

“YouTube’s move to standardize how their channels look is an effort to [make] the channels a more appealing place. . . . It’s all about stealing TV dollars,” said TargetCast ad-agency CEO Steve Farella.

The downside, according to some, is that as of June 5, old layouts will be obsolete. As millions of brand channels are translated into the new format, the old branding formats will disappear from a page and will have to be retrieved manually.

A Google spokesman insisted, “Your branding will not be deleted. We’ll have a help center post that will tell people how to download their artwork if they’d like.”

“I think of all the old brand channels, a minimum of 60 percent will convert within the first year,” said Clipster CEO Loek Wermenbol, which is one of only a handful of developers Google has approved to handle the conversion to the new format. “Video is the most important thing on the Internet. They want to be prepared for full integration.”

Show tine

Pitchfork Media, which has become a go-to destination in the alternative-music world, is making a move into a new area with the launch of a film site, called The Dissolve, that will debut sometime next month.

Keith Phipps, former editor of The A.V. Club, who will oversee an editorial staff of eight out of Chicago, said, “It is for film fans for all levels of intensity.”

He’s not jumping into the cutthroat inside-Hollywood business coverage that has Deadline Hollywood and The Wrap butting heads.

“We’re coming at it more as fans and critics,” he said, trying to emulate in film what Pitchfork has done in the indie music world.

Pitchfork’s rise has coincided with the slide of music-entertainment magazines Spin and Vibe and, earlier, Blender.

Pitchfork President Chris Kaskie said the expansion into film criticism is strictly a one-off.

“It is not a precursor to a lot of branch-outs,” he said.

Senior power

Myrna Blyth, a former editorial director of Ladies Home Journal and More, who is running editorial operations for AARP, has hired former Rolling Stone editor Bob Love as the new editor-in-chief of AARP magazine.

Thanks to its association with AARP, the bimonthly magazine has a massive subscription base of 22.4 million, making it the largest paid-circulation magazine in America.